Thursday, December 10, 2009

Budgetary Greek Tragedy?

This is the view taken from our back garden this morning. I was hoping for something very bleak to illustrate the Budgetary fallout, but there was more light than I was expecting...

Perhaps the government did a very good PR job preparing us beforehand but the fear that we would be in some post-Budget economic Armageddon today does not appear to be the case.

I did spectacularly badly in my economics A-level so I will not even try to pick over the bones of the budgetary casualties this morning; such as those who work in the Public Sector, the unemployed, and just about everybody wondering how they will afford Christmas. Perhaps the most bizarre thing is that in an attempt to stop people travelling up to Northern Ireland to do their shopping, the tax on alcoholic drinks has been cut! So a pint of beer will have 12c less duty on it and a bottle of wine 60c - I fear though that this will not make any difference at all. The traffic-jam between Dublin and Newry is not going away just yet.

And then even more bizarrely, I heard on the radio that because we are one of the economic 'bad boys', we are linked in with the economically renegade Greeks as far the ECB is concerned. So in some ways we are dependent upon the Greeks sorting their economy out in order to be on firmer financial footing ourselves. It's like two mountaineers roped together - if the Greeks fall, they drag us down with them. Imagine if the €400 million that the government are borrowing every week came to an end - now that really would be a Greek Tragedy.